Experiment & Play: Making Collage Papers and a Collage

1. Making Collage Papers Intro: Hi, my name is Sarah Tobias. I am a former librarian and an artist. I am a writer. And my biggest challenge to date has been being consistent with my art. I have let fear getting in the way, in so many different ways throughout the years that I would start and stop and start and stop and so often say someday I will. Now that has changed. No more someday, I make art every day. I love to create collages as a way to relax. Yes, I said to relax rather than worrying about what anyone else thinks when I make art for me, I am in my happy place. My heart rate goes down. I totally in the zone. And I wanted to share with you that I hope by taking this class, you will not only create your own collage papers and a final collage, but discover the fun of creating for you. Just you, no one else. There's no good, there's no bad. It's all about enjoyment and doing it out of the pleasure of creating, instead of worrying about what anyone else thinks. Meet me in the next video and I'll tell you all about what we're going to do and then we'll get started. Thanks for joining me. 2. The Collage Project: Welcome to the next video. It's time to talk about those projects. In this little course, we're going to make several different collage papers using different techniques so that you just have a variety of ways you can play and have a good time from using white crayons and watercolor paints to make it your own tissue paper collage. I think they call that a collage. Collage. I don't know. We'll play with pens and markers and little bits of paint. You can use those and cut them out as almost like stickers while we're making the collage papers, I want you to be thinking about an affirmation, a quote, something that inspires you and your creativity. Something that helps you move through the fear of perfectionism, the fear of getting it done, the fear of what are your fears? I know those are two fears that have often cropped into my work, but what things stop you from creating? Think about a phrase or a quote, or just a few words that work for you to help you move forward. And we'll take those words. We will create a collage with our new collage papers. It might be something like this insane. Embrace my mistakes. Actually I think it says embrace your mistakes. I made this one kind of quickly. I wanted to play with papers that I even thought were mistakes. Embrace your mistakes is a phrase that helps me remember. Mistakes are just a way of learning. And when it goes wrong, I can quit there, or I can choose to move forward and figure out what went wrong and try again. I'm all about trying again. That's our project. I can't wait to see you in the next video. We're going to have a lot of fun, make lots of papers, and an awesome affirmation that you can keep secretly in a little notebook for yourself. Or maybe you do want to post it on social media so everyone sees what you have created and maybe it will inspire others as well. But that is all up to you and that's the final piece. There's nothing you can do wrong in this class except not take it. So let's get going. See you in the next video. 3. Discover the Fodder of Life: Hi, Welcome back to discovering the father of life. In other words, collecting what many people might consider to be garbage or recyclables and putting them to fun use in your collage. This is from a napkin with plastic where there was wrapped around it. And I liked the spirals, so I saved it for future use. Tickets from a train, brochures from different places that I have visited. This is music, old music that I actually got my garden. It was a garbage day and with the wind came a couple of pieces of sheet music. And I quickly grab them and decided they could go into my collage leaking stuff. Other things you might collect, there's the tissue paper out of a shoe box or from a gift bag. You may also discover some greeting cards that come in the mail that are really pretty. They may be used as part of a collage or maybe it's just inspiration. Other things that I have thrown into my little collage kit or a little funny sketches that I have made. So I save them because someday they might just be the perfect thing to go into collage. These are little paint strips testing pink colors. I hope this might end up being fun as kind of a pattern sometime you can also print out photographs and use just bits and pieces of photographs in your artwork. The other little things, this probably most people would throw in the garbage, but you never know it might come in handy for a collage someday. I tend to save my little scraps of paper. I also love opening the mail and discovering the very fun insides of security envelopes. There's so much variety in them, and it's quite fun and exciting. Old books, I found this one for twenty-five cents. It's actually was a neat old book, but it's in horrible condition in many ways. But these colors are really fun and can be playful collage. You can also print from a book, a page, and cut out from that so that you're not necessarily destroying a book that you really like. But maybe it has phrases or a section that you love and would like to add to your collage. So you can do something like that. So go on, start scavenger ring, find a bunch of different things that you would like for your collage making and just gather them up. You don't have to do anything with them right now. We can put them to use with our end project. See you in the next video. 4. Watercolor and Crayons Do Mix: Welcome back. This is the first demo where we're going to play with watercolor and crayons. Some people say they don't mix, but we will show you that they can. I have here watercolors in a variety of forms. This is just a little palette that I keep and take with me lots of different places. I made it in a mint box. Then I have this tray that's already got some paints poured out from tubes like this. I like working with the tubes. You get a lot for your money. And that's how I actually make my little palette to take with me. Then here are our Kranz, the white ones, the one I want to play with now, I highly recommend trying the white 1 first. It's a little bit magical, and then you can go ahead and play with some other colors if you like making this and want to make more papers. If you don't have watercolor, you can take acrylic paints and water them down to a thin wash. They will work just fine and we'll wash over the crayons. Or you could use some India ink and thin that down a little bit. So it's more like a wash. If you don't have any of those, but you like drinking tea or coffee, you can even use the dregs of those. I have two brushes, a little bit fat, one, round 12, and then 1.5 inch really inexpensive brush for my wash, some water. And that's all we need. But we don't need those at the moment. First, we want to start with our crayon. So grab a white crayon and all you need to do is make squiggles. Something you could do spirals like this. As you can see, you can't see what's actually happening. But that's the fun and magic of it all. So I am just making kind of spirals. They're really messy ones I can tell. But I wanted to make it fast, simple. Let go of any possible fears and worries about what it's going to look like because you really can't mess it up. It will be fun as something that you can cut out no matter what. So that one is all spirals. And then this is quinacridone rose. I like this color very much and pretty thick. To get it bright. If you want a paler color, then you just thin out the paint as you can see. If it's water ear, it's going to be thinner. If you paint really fast. It won't dry. So you can, whoops, spilling, like I said, this can be messy. But then I'm going to add some, this is gamboge Nova. It's a more orangey based yellow. And I think it makes a really fun combination with this. And that's it. That's one sheet of paper. So you can go on and make more. I'm going to set this aside. Alright, I made that one. And then I'm just going to truly squiggle around here. Because I wanted to do it fast. Again. Fast is easy. But you can do things in a little more. Slow pace if you want to. This time, I am going to use my opera pink. It's another color that I have fallen in love with. Somebody, used it in a thing that I watched and I was blown away by the brightness. Because watercolors June really on this bright. But it's very bright. And then here, this other palette is a reading or purple. These are actually washable paint temperatures. I'm going to try it out because I really never have and I gets really thin. So don't add a lot of water. This one gets thinner, like getting much red out of it. It's a strange texture too. But globally. So here we learn as we go. But the tempera paint doesn't really need water added to it. They don't see the craziness much, but we'll see what happens actually when it dries. Because I've noticed a lot of times when I work that after things dry, you notice the background details. So again, think about it this 11 more as quickly as possible. Maybe instead of a squiggles, you want to be a little more specific. So you could do the alphabet J, K, L, M, N, O P Q R S T U, V, W. Everybody is singing along q, t be, the end of the alphabet has been reached. Alright, so I've used that fat brush. Let's test out this thinner brush. And what happens if we take this quinacridone coral? Again, this is, this is much thicker and this is quinacridone rose, a combination. I kinda like that. And you can see, it looks almost like maybe I didn't press hard with my crayon little opera pink in here. So just play, have fun with your water. Thin it out as much as you need to to spread it. I'm finding that I prefer the airbrush. So if you have a fat brush, it definitely goes on much more easily, more smoothly. I just grabbed yellow. That's okay. The top. Let's see what happens. We have three sheets of paper basically all in the same color tone. I like making multiples and kind of similar color tones because then you can combine them for different elements on the same thing. And that is all there is to doing it with Creon relief. It will show you this is one I did the alphabet using pinks and reds and a purple and then I did a blue wash over it. Then there's this using a red with pink paint and yellow with an orange and hearts. So you can see there's loads of different ways that you can make this type of paper. Have fun. Make a few sheets, let them dry and they'll probably wrinkle up a little bit, but just toss them under a heavy book after they're dry and they'll flatten out in no time. I will see you in the next video. 5. Two for One: Watercolor and Doodles: Welcome back to the next video. I hope your first sheets of paper or drying nicely. And you had fun and played with your crayons and your paints. Now, we're going to play with the paints again using basically the same paint. I just pulled a blue palette with one little yellow in there. And we're going to use that paper as well as a sketchbook or another little sheet of paper that you can pull off to the side. And we're going to set that aside for a moment. After we make the background for our paper, we're going to go ahead and play with some pens. These are Posca, markers, jelly rolls, Sharpies, you can use any kind of panic can be a Bic pen. It really doesn't matter. It's up to you. Let's put those aside for right now because we don't really need them. And paint a piece of paper. This is the low blue, which is kinda got a tinge of green in it. And it's got a lot of water going on here. Toss in another, see if I can darken that up a little bit. And then take B, this one, this is cerulean. Blue, knows roughly similar. Alright, have fixed that. Turquoise never fails to add some life to the sheet. This is lemon yellow, and I don't want the dots there. Then once again, set that aside, use my sketchbook and use my smaller brush. And this time, we're just going to take these colors that we just used. Here's the civilian blue and make some dots. Just fill up your page with the palette that you were using. We're going to use this sheet just to create some simple ideas. It's kind of helpful to do a little practice pieces and see what you do like and what you don't. For colors. I made this sheet and I was playing, these are all Jelly Roll pens that I played with different colors. This blue, these are the moonlight jelly rolls. And they tend to go on really nicely over watercolors. I did the same thing again here. This is the opera. Pink was my main color, and then I mixed a variety of colors. And again, played with those pens, these are a great place to play. And then you can actually take them and you could cut all of them out and keep them in a little package for future collages. And these can just be little elements to your collage, like almost like a little sticker. So those are some options. Here is the page that we have. I said all this stuff and I was drawing these little loops and realize that my camera was too far out for you to actually see what I was doing. What I said was this is just kind of a Zen doodle idea. And I was just doing these little loops over and over again. And they look to me like they could be fish scales. They could be a part of a flower. They could be, I don't know. You name it if you want to. This is mine. But when you come up with yours, name it whatever you want or don't name it, so that when it's, when you're looking through your things, coming up with possible ideas of stuff that you can in a certain way, shape or form. So there's that style right there. Posca pen. This one is called Pink number 13. It's a fat one. So maybe I just want to put poker dots in it. I found these Pentel sparkle pops, pens and they came in a set of, I think, eight colors. I love spirals. So maybe we'll do some spirals and keeps spiraling hoops and see what happens with that idea. I will say this over and over again. If you don't love it, it doesn't matter. You are learning from these experiments. And the worst thing that can happen is you decide you don't like it anymore. Actually, to me, the worst thing that could happen is that you would not learn from playing with it. These are the Jelly Roll goals. If you turn the paper in different directions, you'll be able to see the gold and the green. Along the way. I bet you can come up with different ways to do things. Now, you have a test sheet. You have more fodder for your collages that you can use when we get to making our project. And you hopefully have an idea of what you want to put on your final piece. So looking at these, I love, I love the bright colors, but not in the mood to do that many dots. So my next favorite actually is this with the pencil, I will go ahead and stay with the hearts and peace signs. The key is, just to start going, keep moving around the page. I try not to make lines. It's just a matter of tossing them in there. Don't forget, you may need to sharpen your pencils as you go. There's a lot of landscape here. Alright? I'm almost done. How did it go for you? I will be honest and say It's not my favorite thing to do. I don't mind it, but it's probably more of a winter sitting around kind of thing that I would probably pick up and do more than doing this as a summer project. It's another technique that you can use if you enjoy doing it. Do it. If you don't enjoy doing it, you don't have to effort to it. Again, one thing I want to recommend is that when you do something like this, and I actually forgot with this one, as before you start adding any elements to it, go ahead and scan or photograph your sheets so you have the plain version, then you can print that out. I put some notes on the supply list about scanning and printing and giving you some ideas and ways that you can go about that if you don't have your own scanner and color printer, if you really like a piece that you have and you have the right paper making prints of it gives you the opportunity to use them over and over again. I will see you in the next video. Bright, bold, fun, but not messy. I hope you're enjoying yourself and getting lots of collage papers make 6. Bright, Bold and Fun, But Not Messy (Maybe): This is three different ways that we can basically get to the same end. You could use regular tempera paints, may be that you have from your kids or maybe you've saved them for yourself with a plan. There's those, you can use acrylic paints and then I'm going to use these tempera paint sticks. I learned about these from Vanessa Brantley Newton, and got them for Christmas. And I like them for multiple reasons. They're really thick. You can't do detail super well unless you may be scraped part of it off. But they also are strived very quickly. They come clean easily off of a surface and things like that. But they also stay on really well and have a nice deep color to them. And for me lately I have been going for walks and enjoying the summer. And I have seen so many pink and purple and red combinations of Petunia does. And they look gorgeous. So I thought it would be fun to just play with that idea of just a whole bunch of Petunia does, or flowers together to fill up my piece of paper and see what happens. So as you can see, I am not really trying to mimic the shape of a petunia more just give the sensation of a flower. Generally, my collages don't have a, they never use the whole piece. So in the end, being perfect and coming up with the perfect petunia shape isn't going to matter because you won't see it. That's a lot of red. Let's see if I went too far. If I did, Who cares? Started again, it's a piece of paper. Again, I'm working on just a basic piece of printer paper. And I like doing that. It's thin, it's inexpensive, and it cuts up really nicely for traditional collage. I like it even for scanning for my digital stuff, because again, it's thin. You aren't likely to get a lot of shadows or things like that. And so that's just kind of a lot of the benefits of doing it this way. But even this brown paper that I have under here just to protect my surface is something that can be used. Look at the difference in that color for making your own collage papers. So if you have a piece of brown paper, I want to test it out, see what happens. Worst-case scenario, you get something you don't love. I don't throw my things away that I don't love because evidently I will find a use somewhere that a little snippet off of it or something else that I can use it at some point in some collage. So I just keep them to wait and see what's going to happen. And somewhere down the line, maybe next week, next month, three years from now. Who knows? I will have this piece of paper that works perfectly for whatever I am working on at that time. So don't hesitate, just have fun. That's the whole goal, is imperfection. Allowing yourself to be feel free and not worry about what you're thinking or what you think other people might think. I know this looks a little bit weird. Kinda looks like pinwheels to me, but I don't mind it. And I'm also wondering if I should slip green in here. And just little tiny spots to mimic again that flower or sensation and the leaves of it. But I'm going to just keep going for a little bit and get everything pretty much done. This whitespace, these large spaces of white, it becomes almost too much white. So if you are doing this, a little bit of whitespace is good. A lot of white-space, Not so much. So make sure you keep going, filling in spaces all the way around and look at where that whitespaces. And you can see there, that's kinda fun the way that overlapped. Some of these are thinner, more see-through kind of paint. And then you get this really dense red and this really dense pink. So it's kinda fun to see what happens. And as you can see, there is no wrong in this. Because the only bad thing that can truly happened is you didn't get the effect that you were hoping to get while you were playing. Maybe you've got some ideas of how to get the effect you want. And you can go back and try again to see what happens. I'm going to keep coloring and we'll speed this up so that you don't have to sit here, though. Do tend to like watching videos of other people doing things like this. I find it really quite soothing. Here we go. Let's finish it up. Alright. One last look at what I'm doing and kind of seeing if there's anything left that needs to be filled in. I will toss it in there. I kind of like it. I like the way the colors are and the way that green actually I think, made the purples, pinks and reds pop. So that's it. 8. Affirmation Collage Part One: Here we are with the final piece. We're going to make a collage with the papers that we have gathered and you may discover you don't have everything you want, it's okay to make more as you go. The first step is to have an idea. So for me, I chose the phrase Bloom where you are planted. And last night before bed, I made a little drawing. I do want to make it little tiny pot and then I want to have a big flower at the top. So the first thing that we wanna do is figure out the lettering and kind of get that in place and create the rest of your collage from there. So there are lots of ways you can do lettering. I am not a calligrapher. And if you are, that's fabulous. And you can use calligraphy for your lettering. You can cut out. This is a page from a book and I got some poke weed berries on it. But I think that's okay. And another page from another book and going to use some words. And then I'm also going to use letters to create a word. And I think I will also hand letter in some of the letters. So we'll play with that first. I want to use a sunflower for my flower. So I've pulled some of my yellow papers. I also pull a sheet of green for stems and leaves. I think I'm going to make the pot out of something like this. And I did some stamps. I don't know if I'll use them or not. That's something an added thing at the end. The last piece of paper that I grabbed is this piece from the book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's a favorite book of mine. It's more having plenty of stuff to work with and whittling it down and taking stuff out versus feeling lost because you aren't sure what to do next. So I just gathered a bunch of things that may or may not end up. In the final piece. I am going to do my piece in my sketchbook. So here's my sketchbook. Have my letters. I know what I'm trying to spell. I thought might be interesting to see. Planted is the word not plant. And you can cut your letters or you can tear them out and around. Might be interesting to use different size letters to create a word. Another way that you can do your lettering if you want it to be all one size, is to type it up on your computer and print it out. You can use a variety of sizes even that way. And just type it if you want to. Maybe I will write this on tissue paper. Maybe I'll do it a few times just to kinda play. So you can write it in different ways. You can go back and add. Maybe make it thicker. Like it better if it's a little bit thicker, doing it like this gives you some choices. Maybe you like some of the letters, maybe you don't like any of them and you keep starting over again, play with your lettering. Remember to think about the size of the paper that you are working on. So you've chosen your paper in advance. Play with those, cut them out the rest of the way. And we'll play with them on paper. I'm not sure where I want them at this point. So now it's kind of like playing with the puzzle. Okay? I'm not a 100% sure. I think I really like the letters, the, where you are planted at the bottom. And I think that the bloom is going to go either down this side or somewhere up at the top. I'm actually thinking about making it so the flower expands above the piece of paper. But we'll see how that works. As you can see. I started with this for my bloom and changed my mind. I took a piece of paper that I have painted and just cut out some block letters free hand from them. And I liked the brightness. And the way that it kind of blends together. 9. Affirmation Collage Part Two: My pot is actually made from a photograph of conglomerate. And I like the texture of it. I like how it's tiny and I like how it also implies something growing out of the crack of a sidewalk. And then I'm starting to cut some leaves. And one of the things that I really like about sunflowers is their leaves look a little bit heart-shaped. I often will cut more than I need for a project. You think, oh, I'm going to put all of this on here, and then you start to change your mind as you move down. If you cut out extras, just put them aside, put them in a little Ziploc baggie. And you have them maybe for another project meeting, we reshape them at another time. Then we get into the flower part. As you go. You may want to take our little reference photograph of what you're doing. That way. If you sneeze or you move your paper in such a way that it blows your papers, stuff out of the way. You can go back and find how it was that you had it if you really liked something. It also allows you to experiment because you can have a photograph with it like this. Or you could take a photograph and move your letters up in different places and play around with it. So I hope that you are playing. I hope you found a phrase or affirmation or quote that inspires you and gives you a desire to continue creating. And I thing. What I will do is take a piece of blank white paper, make my flower on here. And then I can cut out around it and put it back on here and possibly even leave the white of the other piece of paper above. Nothing's glued down so you don't have anything that's permanent. But even if you have glued it down and you go back to it afterwards, you can sometimes use a little bit of water to get the pieces back off and start again. Or you can trim around the pieces and start again. I'm not going to glue this bloom down yet. I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to glue the flower first so that I can cut it out. I really haven't taken that much time on this. I did have the idea in my head. I had a little sketch of an idea and I had been thinking about it. Once you have those kinds of things going, let go of worrying exactly what's going to happen and allow it to just flow and see what happens. When it comes down to gluing. It may get a little wonky. I generally use glue sticks for by gluing. These papers are thin enough that that works really well. Glue the other ones. So it's an overlapping thing. Sometimes you can get your glue on and then don't press it down. Glue the next one if it's gonna go under it. If it's not sticking, just peel it up a little bit, add a little more glue and stick it down. I got a little too close there, so I peel back a few pieces. Thank you. To make to spread it out. Again. There's that extra pieces. So I ended up making a little bit smaller. I'm going to go ahead. So I'm going to stick the flower here. And I am going to make a longer stem and probably some larger leaves. I'm glad I didn't choose to glue that down. I also think I'm going to pull in the other last petals and toss them in underneath. First, we'll glue that down. I'm going to replace this stem. I'll let it hang off the top right now, I think as I'm looking at this and as has gotten much bigger, I really want to make a much larger leaf. At least one. I put the B right on top of it. A B on top of a flower. This is when you start really playing and seeing what your options are. And eventually you just say, okay, this is good. I find more often than not, when when things change, when my plan changes a little bit, it's usually because my instincts and my intuition are kicking in and I am actually coming up with something that I like even better. There is an artist whose name is Rachel Hazel and she does a lot of sketch bookmaking and art-making in her sketchbooks. And she talked about how she loves the idea that a sketch book gets thicker as you make things and then it is bursting with life. And so I like this idea that not only will it make my sketch book Fat, this piece is about bursting with life. I cut out this little beasties job, which I may put in here by also have these little circles that I had just cut out randomly and might put them here to fill in some space. I have the butterfly stamp in there. I'm undecided. Those are things that you can kind of just sat down, work on the other parts of it. Gluing anything down that you still need to glue down. You need to glue the underside of the flower, these letters. And then I will decide, uh, kind of like this around and brings you back into a circle. So I like the way that's working. I'm going to finish this up, figure out how to fold it and not hopefully just try it. And then I will show you the final piece. This is my sketchbook where I made my Bloom where you are planted. And as you can see, I have it folded down here. I did finally managed to get it attached. It requires a lot of folding and unfolding. So I don't know if I would it exactly this way again, but I do like how it turned out on the whole. I think it's bright and fun and nice reminder. And the fact that it is so big. When you stick your finger in the book, this page is always going to stick out and remind me to bloom where I'm planted even if I don't open it up. 10. Making Collage Papers Conclusion: That's it. We use our scissors, we used our glue, we cut, we make so many pieces of paper. I know I did during this. And I found some new techniques that I've enjoyed doing. I had lots of fun making my collage. I hope you enjoyed working on it too and came up with something that truly inspires you to keep going, to keep creating, whether it's making collage papers, making collages, doing another form of art. Thank you so much for coming to my class and participating and creating papers and your affirmation collage. I hope to really hope that you really did it at that you will share it with me. I gave you a list at the beginning of the class with affirmations that you could choose from. If you chose something different and it's something you are happy to share, I hope you will share those affirmations. I will add them to my list for future people taking this class. And I hope you will share, at least in the class project area, a picture of your affirmation or one or two of your collage papers. Also, if you by any chance, came up with an idea for ways to make collage paper that I didn't share with you. I'd love to hear about those as well because I'm always looking for fun ways to make collage papers that I can incorporate into my artwork. Thank you again for participating. I had a great time making this class. I hope you had a great time.